I offered Andrew Yee to bring
his great medical eponym database to the iPhone and therefore started working on an iPhone client. Due to the lack of an iPhone I am only testing this client on my MacBook Pro and Safari/iPhoney, but the iPhone is not as powerful as my laptop, surprise surprise.
So to be able to determine what the iPhone is capable of, I let the client spit out some debug information - and this gives a good opportunity to compare or even benchmark iPhones' Safari to Safari on other platforms (or other browsers). Of course this is not a complete benchmark, nevertheless it's interesting to see how iPhones' Safari performs on three tasks:
- generating ~1'600 JavaScript objects
- adding ~1600 links to a div (DOM)
- animating two div transitions
In case you want to send me your results, load the following URI in Safari or
iPhoney, hit "Load eponyms..." and
tell me what gets written on the leftmost page:
code.hillrippers.ch/eponyms/
Here is what I have so far, if not specified otherwise Safari 3 Beta on OS X (10.4.10) was used:
| Device | download (AJAX) | generating objects | adding links | animation |
| iPhone | 8'500 ms | 550 ms | 185 ms | 13 - 20 fps |
| MBP 2.33GHz, 2GB RAM | 500 ms | 370 ms | 98 ms | 83 - 100 fps |
| MBP + Camino 1.6a | 170 ms | 1234 ms | 320 ms | 23 - 30 fps |
| MBP + Firefox 2.0.0.4 | 440 ms | 1450 ms | 320 ms | 23 - 30 fps |
| PM G4 350MHz, 704MB RAM | 1'500 ms | 3'800 ms | 1'500 ms | 13 - 17 fps |
| PM G4 + Safari 2 | 1'750 ms | 7'150 ms | 1'440 ms | 17 - 20 fps |
| PM G4 + Camino 1.6a | 750 ms | 16'550 ms * | 3'200 ms | 7 - 10 fps |
* plus displaying a warning that the script does not respond
What impressed me most is the blatant difference between the iPhone and my old G4 Mac. It is waaay slower than the iPhone on certain tasks.
If anyone has a more recent G4 Mac I'd very much like to see how it performs, Safari 3 values preferably.
The page won't render 100% correctly on other browsers (there'll be a seperate version for the desktop FYI).
Rafael: Thank you very much, I was having a huge headache to solve the very same problem!